How does Scribd help protect the rights of authors?

Content that is removed from Scribd via a DMCA copyright infringement takedown notice is added to our copyright protection system. This system performs a semantic analysis of the document by analyzing word count, word frequency, letter combinations, spacing, and other criteria. The semantic analysis results in a special encoded file that we call a "fingerprint." The encoded fingerprint is stored in a secure database that is inaccessible to the public.

Whenever a new document is uploaded to Scribd, it is analyzed and checked against the "fingerprints" in our copyright database. If there's a significant match, the upload is removed from Scribd. Since the fingerprint system is based on text analysis, it is less effective on documents that do not contain computer-readable text information (such as scanned photos).